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Can Your Building Produce Energy, Water, Food?

Not so long ago, before the crash of 2008, the point of contemporary architecture was to be taller, bigger, more iconic and audacious than what came before.

"It was not so much an obsession with buildings as with objects" says architect Dong Ping Wong "but when the market fell apart, the architecture sort of lost it's role."

Welcome Productive Architecture. Can our buildings make clean water, air, food? Dong Ping Wong's is a founding partner of Family, a design firm based in New York.

Listen to a few of their projects, some further along than others:

- a building that is designed to generate so much solar power that it gives back energy to the whole neighborhood.

- a building cut on a bias to allow for maximum wind hitting it. Smaller windmills are attached externally all up and down the sides of the building, generating also enough to sell energy back to the city.

- a floating pool in the East River of New York that filters the water enough to allow for swimming in the vast cross shaped pool.

- a larger development with a food producing courtyard, protected from the metropolitan environment.

WOW! We need more engineers and architects like this to put our buildings to work!